The present invention relates to machine translation of handwritten information and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for customizing handwriting models to individual writers to improve the accuracy of translation.
With the rise in the popularity of hand-held, pen-based computers, the need for accurate machine translation of handwritten text into machine printed text has increased. However, due to the wide variety of handwriting styles, many of which have ambiguous and/or conflicting character representations, generic machine translation with high fidelity is a very difficult task. To reduce this problem, methods have been developed to attempt to enable machine translation devices to adapt to individual writers' styles. These methods can be divided into those which require the collection of samples of a writers' handwriting and those which do not. Typically, the methods which require samples of a writers' handwriting are preferable due to their superior translation performance. However, none of the conventional handwriting translation systems have been able to provide customization which provides consistently accurate and significantly improved translation results.